May 22, 2009 |
The folks at Jenkins Arboretum in Devon have been so "green" for so long, you wonder: Is it in the water? They use donated garden tools that they dutifully clean and sharpen. They print on both sides of their copy paper, something we've been meaning to do. They bundle errands to save gasoline, also on our to-do list, and in winter, without complaint, they layer up to curb heating costs. "We've always been frugal," says executive director Harold E. Sweetman, who speaks of this 46-acre woodland sanctuary in personal terms.
April 27, 2009
STARTING IN 1682, when William Penn stepped upon our shores, he set the stage for horticulture in this region. For nearly 200 years thereafter, until 1876, horticulture here was able to hit its peak. When the desired plants were hard to come by, trading, collecting and propagation was the tradition. In the current horticultural era, local arboretums, botanical gardens and gardeners are seeking to refine and redefine their approaches to their gardens. For some, the trend is toward all native plants.
December 21, 2008 |
Marjorie Unger Bayersdorfer, 75, a social worker and award-winning gardener who championed the use of native plants to beautify and preserve the environment, died of ovarian cancer last Sunday at the Hill at Whitemarsh, a retirement community in Lafayette Hill. Before daughter-in-law Cyane Gresham, a gardening expert, and a conference at Millersville University opened Mrs. Bayersdorfer's eyes to native plants, her gardening was a beloved pasttime that merely created a lovely landscape.
November 21, 2008 |
Eileen Boyle takes a bird's-eye view of the fall garden. She sees it as a bountiful buffet of fruits, nuts and seeds. She won't eat them herself. She'll use them, along with dried apricots and apples, popcorn and Cheerios, to make a holiday wreath that's a treat for birds and a delight for people who like to watch them. "You'll have birds till February. It's so cool," says Boyle, education coordinator at the nonprofit Mount Cuba Center near Wilmington, which studies and celebrates regional native plants and wildflowers.
October 17, 2008 |
Sinclair Adam used to cringe when his pals called him "the pharaoh of foamflower. " Now, he embraces his inner sovereign with only a slight grimace, hoping it helps get the word out about tiarella, the starry little wildflower he adores. "Tiarellas rock," says Adam, a pipe-smoking plant breeder and horticulturist who runs Dunvegan Nursery with his wife, Kirsten, from an 18th-century farmhouse in Coatesville. More properly known as Tiarella cordifolia, which refers to their heart-shaped leaves and small tiaralike flower sprays, shade-loving "foamies" have been an Adam preoccupation for two decades.
October 3, 2008 |
Fall cleanup in the garden is almost a biological imperative. Each year at this time, we gleefully troop outside with pruners and rakes to buzz-cut the plants and scoop up the leaves. We stuff our handiwork into trash bags, deposit them on the curb, and away they go. Nice, neat - and absolutely not the case with Cindy Ahern. Instead of whacking plants and ornamental grasses that have turned brown and gone to seed on her half-acre property, she sings a chorus of "Let It Be. " And instead of tossing all those crispy leaves, she recycles some as "natural mulch" in her garden beds and puts the rest on her compost pile.
August 15, 2008 |
It's pretty, colorful, tall and tough. So how come Dale Watson hates purple loosestrife? Scratch that. She doesn't hate it. She's upset that she still sees so much of it. Though beautiful, purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) is considered a noxious thug that grows fast, spreads far, and obliterates everything in its path, especially along waterways. "Purple loosestrife is so destructive. It's really bad," says Watson, a social worker from Goshen, Cape May County, who isn't shy about confronting anyone buying, selling or planting it in her home state, where it's still legal.
May 21, 2008 |
A light drizzle and gray sky did nothing to dim the enthusiasm of a group of preteens as they planted flowers and shrubs on Independence Mall yesterday as a way to deepen their interest in nature. The children, from the Germantown and Nicetown Boys and Girls Clubs, were participating in First Bloom, a new program of the National Park Foundation that teaches children about nature through planting and gardening projects. The program is designed to help children learn how to protect fragile ecosystems by planting native species in national parks and how to raise gardens in their neighborhoods.
April 18, 2008 |
You can pick Ruth Pfeffer out of a crowd any day. She's the one perpetually looking up, binoculars in hand, joy on her face. Or, you can wait for someone to yell, "Hey, bird lady!" or "Yo, hawkeye!" "My life is for the birds," Pfeffer jokes. And, joke or not, it's pretty much true. While you're standing on her deck in Willow Grove, squinting into the sun and straining to see movement, she's rattling off the names of a dozen birds a minute flitting across the sky, hopping over the yard, landing in the trees.
February 1, 2008 |
Sharon Barkhymer uses words like thrifty and frugal to describe her penny-pinching gardening style, but other people call her just plain cheap. "I'm not cheap," she protests. "I'm responsible. " Let's add smart to this list of adjectives. Seen a "hot new plant" catalog lately? You can spend $50 for a hosta - or you can fill your car with gas. So the beleaguered Barkhymer's onto something: You don't have to spend your inheritance to have a beautiful garden.